President Obama and ABCTE

It is appropriate for the blogosphere to recognize the transformation in DC right now. Since our birth occurred during the Bush era I am often asked how we will fair with the new administration. The answer apparently lies at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/education/

• Recruit Teachers: Obama and Biden will create new Teacher Service Scholarships that will cover four years of undergraduate or two years of graduate teacher education, including high-quality alternative programs for mid-career recruits in exchange for teaching for at least four years in a high-need field or location.

Three years ago, we set out to create a Board of Directors that absolutely focused on solving a problem. Our current board is a bi-partisan board that has helped us ensure that our program resonates with anyone who wants to look at the issue from one point of view: does it help students succeed.

It is an exciting time in education and the changes that will occur in the next few years because so many people are focused student success will be transformational.

Education budget cuts will get even worse

Just over a year ago, I predicted extreme belt-tightening ahead in state budgets. After looking at my retirement savings, I wish that I wasn’t so right. Now we read that 29 states face a total shortfall of $48 billion. And the states that were immune last year to the real estate crumble because they had oil and natural gas revenues are going to be hit hard with oil down under $80.

This is all very bad news for education spending. It will go down and it will go down hard.

At the Broad event, it was of deep concern to the superintendents on the panel. They felt it was going to hit their students and that they were going to have to make very difficult changes. They are going to have to get help from the community. What they were not doing is whining. They seemed to take it in stride and stayed focused on the kids.

States have got to find ways to cut that don’t adversely affect student learning. They need to find efficiencies in their systems that can fully leverage the smaller budgets they are going to find.

Programs like ABCTE that have been funded with federal dollars to reduce their recruitment cost is an excellent example. States and districts don’t pay a dime for our program yet they receive high quality teachers who stay in the classroom (85% retention after 4 years). Instead of providing a four year scholarship for a math teacher to Florida State, that money could be used to scholarship 100 math teachers through ABCTE. Instead of paying $5,000 - $7,000 per teacher for a recruitment program in the district, the district could work with ABCTE at $2,500 per teacher.

These are significant savings and could help save after school programs, reading programs that make our schools better.

If we can only get leaders to stop looking at the politics and look at the results – we can make this happen.

Fixing Teacher Quality

Teaching quality continues to move forward in the news. Mike Petrilli has an excellent write up in the Gadfly from last week and now a new article in the Washington Post about what the newly canonized Michelle Rhee plans to do. But they are all trying to run before we learn to walk.
Management texts will tell you that you need to focus on improving staff. In teaching, the staggering numbers always tell the tale.

There are 3.2 million teachers. Jack Welch, the brilliant CEO of GE, made his managers rank all staff so that they knew the top 20%, middle 70% and the bottom 10%. The top 20% were fast tracked into leadership positions and the bottom 10% got fired.

We would have to fire 320,000 teachers per year. That would double the number of teachers we need to hire each year and since we can’t find enough to fill our positions now, we will never have enough if we start to really push an aggressive approach towards eliminating mediocre teaching.

The other problem with rating teachers is that our principals have not demonstrated that they are really all that great at rating teachers. Here I am siding with the teacher’s unions again - but we would really need some serious evaluation training for principals before we can start this type of approach.

To solve teacher quality we need to do the following:

1. Fix recruitment – have enough candidates for each position so that the principal can hire the right teacher for his/her students – we need more routes to the classroom to increase the numbers
2. Be Selective - less than 40% of our ABCTE candidates make it through the program and we are starting to see great results from our teachers
3. Train principals in hiring – ensure they know how to match the teacher to the students
   Develop great performance evaluations for teachers – outcomes and observations based and ensure the evaluation is more than once a year
4. Train principals on evaluations – ensure they know how to develop teachers
5. Develop truly great professional development for teachers – develop efficacy measure for the professional development to ensure it meets minimum standards
6. Train principals on how to assign prescriptive professional development from performance evaluations

Once that is in place, then you can start to move teachers who do not succeed with students out of the classroom. But we have a lot of work to do learning to walk before we can start running.

BIG MO!!

MO – it stands for Missouri and momentum. We got a little of both yesterday when the Missouri State House voted final approval of Senate Bill 1066 without any new amendments. This means the bill goes on to the Governor who has shown he is in favor of the bill. This will allow ABCTE to recruit, prepare and certify new teachers for Missouri schools.

A lot of work goes into an effort like this since the Ed Schools don’t want the competition and the NEA is still battling against us. Oddly, their fight was to add Praxis to the bill which made no sense since the cut score is so low for Missouri teachers that it really doesn’t help determine anything. But we pressed on and the cooler heads in the legislature agreed.

It is great to see that you can bring common sense solutions to the states and, after a few years, people take action. It takes some great legislators who are mainly concerned with great schools to get it done. Legislators like our bill sponsors Senator Luanne Ridgeway and Representative Scott Muschany.

We continue to move forward in other states and those that need teachers and are tired of excuses, will be the states where we focus our efforts. For now, it is off to Missouri to start recruiting for us!

Teach & Inspire

Recruiting teachers is not an easy task as any principal can tell you. But there are a lot of people out there that want to teach. In April 2007, the Tarrance Group conducted a survey of Florida residents and found that 28% wanted to teach at some point in their lives.

This month we started the Teach & Inspire scholarship program. It does confirm that there are many out there who want to teach. We had information sessions in Mississippi and Florida in January and had over 2,500 people attend those sessions. Of those, over 440 applied to be in the program. We have now sent out acceptance notices to 197.

To read the essays of these potential teachers is truly inspiring. They have come to a point in their lives where they know that they want to teach and they just need someone to help them get there.

“I want the children in my community to know that it is not about where you come from, it is about where you end up.”--Sundra Jefferson, Teach & Inspire participant

“Educators are here to help those that are falling by the wayside rise and achieve. Not only do I feel obligated to help these school districts, but I feel that it is my constitutional obligation as well.”--Christy Isom, Teach & Inspire participant

Through a Transition to Teaching grant, we will help place these great people with this incredible desire to teach into high needs schools teaching math, science, English and special education.

Amazing what can happen when politics get pushed aside in favor of real actions.

Been a little busy......

It has been a while since I blogged - but it turns out that many states are looking for the solutions we offer.

In Missouri, the Senate passed a bill allowing ABCTE to recruit, prepare and certify teachers. A lot of press on this since one senator attempted to filibuster the bill that ultimately passed 25 to 5. It is now on to the Missouri House.

Mo Chamber lauds Senate action on bill to make it easier for career professionals to switch to teachingBy Jo Mannies, STL Post-Dispatch, Political Fix

Gov. Blunt Statement on Alternative Teacher Certification
JEFFERSON CITY - Gov. Matt Blunt today issued the following statement commending the Missouri Senate for passing legislation to allow alternative teacher certification:"One of the issues I addressed earlier this month at the 2008 Governors Summit on Regional Economic Development is the teacher shortage that exists in some areas of our state in subjects such as math and science."We need to provide the opportunity for highly motivated people with education and experience in these areas to have the training to bring their expertise to the classroom. Missouri's current system of alternative certification of professionals who want to become teachers is too restrictive. I support this alternative, to allow certification through the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence."I called for an alternate certification process when I ran for Governor, and I commend the Missouri Senate for passing Sen. Luann Ridgeway's forward-looking legislation to allow an alternate way for motivated professionals to become certified to teach in Missouri classrooms."

And in Utah they are looking at legislation to reward teachers who pass our Distinguished Teacher program with a $3,000 bonus - outstanding progress in recognizing great teachers.

Details about the bundled education and tax bills

So - at least I have an excuse for missing a few blogs. Flying between DC, Missouri and Utah is not easy. More to come as we continue to work with legislators looking to solve education problems today.

A GREAT week for education improvement

The "good weeks" in education improvement really keep you going. This week was certainly one of those weeks here. We had our 750th certification!! She is a health care professional from North Carolina who is moving to South Carolina to teach science. See what happens when you have the right program to attract career changers NC – you get the teachers you need!! (or if you don't, you lose a great science teacher)

Teach and Inspire – our scholarship program to recruit more teachers of color has had over 250 people attend information sessions in Florida in the last two days! Our very lofty goal is to recruit 350 science and math teachers of color for high needs schools - - we are well on our way right now.

Our charter school teacher recruitment event was amazing – we had 50 potential teachers come out last night in Tucson and have double that signed up for Phoenix on Saturday. Looks like that is going to work out well and we can expand that to other charter schools in the upcoming months.

And I testified in Florida about our Distinguished Teacher program – a lot of interest in this right now as state leaders struggle to find good performance pay programs.

Nothing like a great week in education improvement to keep you coming back for more!

Charter Schools: help is on the way

The Issue:
• Teachers have the greatest influence on student achievement
• There are not enough great teachers
• School districts have TFA and TNTP to help them
• Charter schools need to start demonstrating that they are really increasing student achievement
• Charter schools are not getting the staffing they need

The Solution:
• Hold ABCTE recruitment events just for Charter and Private Schools

So that is what we are doing next week. In Arizona we will hold two teacher recruitmentevents just for public charter schools. Those career-changers that are ready to get into teaching will complete our preparation program to ensure they are ready to go and be ready to teach by the fall.

“Human Capital” is the new buzz word in education. It is just a fancy way of saying we have a severe shortage of great teachers. If we don’t all start working together to get more great people into the classroom, we can never truly impact student achievement and improve our schools.

Talent Competition

There is a limited pool of talent in the United States. In an expanding economy, recruiters are competing with each other for that talent. In most companies, these recruiters are savvy, experienced talent scouts who are trained for this role and know the tools that help them succeed. They have only one role – recruit the best possible talent for the company.

In our school districts, the recruiter is usually a former teacher who is not trained in these tools and usually has many other jobs on top of recruitment such as mentoring coordinator, professional development coordinator etc.

Yet they are both competing for the same people. This may explain why our schools do not have the math and science teachers they need.

One part of the solution – go where the technical types are to find the talent for our schools – the web:

• Web site: most district/state websites are way too hard to figure out. Here is a great test – invite your non-teaching friends over and have them go to your website and try to find out how to become a teacher. Odds are they will leave your house in frustration before figuring it out – just like some potential teachers.
• Web seminars: cheap, easy and you can run them whenever you want. Potential teachers can watch from the comfort of their own homes.
• Google Ads: can be focused to your state and can be pretty cost effective. If a math/science person is looking to teach – their first stop is going to be a search engine.
• Capture their interest: have a spot on your website for people to request more information. Becoming a teacher is a big decision – sending more information might get them to finally take the step. You can then send email updates to people about upcoming web seminars as well.

We have had over 60,000 people inquire about the ABCTE program – top search words that have attracte people to our website: jobs, teaching, teacher, school, become a teacher, teacher certification, teachers and teaching jobs. Bid for those google ad words and you are on your way to recruiting more teachers.

Alternative Certification Isn't

Obviously we are thrilled with the recent study by Fordham and NCTQ revealing that Alternative Certification in the US really isn't. I remember back a few years when I briefly thought about going to law school and looked into a couple of night schools. I found out that they basically consisted of the day time program crammed into the night - it wasn't spread out or really designed for busy professionals to complete their course work. It was designed to work well for the university.

So to with Alternative Certification programs - and it is not surprising since most states put union members and ed school professors on their certification approval committees. Can anyone really be surprised that the programs they approve all include course work? The sad thing is that most of the course work is done during the first year of teaching. So this new teacher has to learn the craft, create great lesson plans, grade their papers, build their stamina (let's not kid ourselves - this is key) and then go to classes at night?? Gee - I wonder why they don't stay around long.

Also - it gets really annoying out there when everyone thinks that Teach for America, The New Teacher Project and Troops to Teachers are alternative certification programs- they are not. They are recruitment strategies (that work by the way!!). They recruit prospective teachers and help them get through current certification methods accepted in the state.

One can only hope that people read this and understand that to truly attract more people into teaching, we need alternative certification routes designed to attract professionals who want to work with America's students.

Gen X and Gen Y: any teachers there?

Education loves to ignore societal trends – going through time as if nothing could alter the current operation. Finding talent is one such blind spot. In the past, “Education” always found the talent they needed so they ignored the incredible societal shift going on around them. The current teacher preparation, recruitment and certification system is a great system for finding and keeping baby boomers. But that no longer represents the current reality.

So – will that system work for Gen X and Gen Y workers of today and who cares? Because boomers are retiring, Kelly Services reports that in just 4 years, Gen X and Y will make up 70% of the workforce – so you can’t just ignore them. And the gap between labor supply and demand will continue to widen over the next 20 years.

We have an antiquated system competing for talent with private sector recruiters who understand the Gen X and Gen Y characteristics and are heavily marketing to attract top employees. If nothing changes, teaching will continue to get “left behind”.

And the last Pew study doesn’t bode well for teacher education programs since 81% of 18-25 year olds say that being rich and famous is the most important goal of their generation. Sorry NEA – a $10,000, or even a $20,000 raise in starting salaries is not going to attract this generation in ed school programs.

To properly staff our schools we have to figure out how to attract Gen X and Gen Y once they figure out that getting rich is not where it’s at. To do that we have to get career changes by doing the following:

• Use the web to get their interest - I dare you to figure out the process to become a teacher through the web in almost any state or district – you have to help them become teachers
• Use the web to advertise – google ads are huge for us right now and one of the main reasons we now have 4,500 candidates
• Get High tech – our teacher preparation and certification must be high tech in order to attract them into the program – think online and podcasts
• Get Customized and Flexible– these generations did NOT grow up in a one-size-fits-all society and won’t accept that in their teaching program
• Understand they are not going to stay in teaching– career/job loyalty is gone – understand it and use that to your advantage to attract talent from other careers
• Immediate payoffs – they want pay plans and career ladders so these must be in place to attract the right talent
• Summers off – Gen X and Y work to live and Teaching needs to highlight the opportunity to do just that – leverage this competitive edge over other careers

Gen X and Gen Y have too many choices. If teaching doesn’t understand them, they will go do something else. Teacher recruitment, preparation and certification programs that are designed to attract these groups will be the most successful as the baby boomers head towards retirement.